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Auf die schönen Possen is a collection by an aging poet, the voice still powerful (and angry), but mortality and physical frailty (weakening eyes, for example) making for occasionally more melancholy contemplation.
Braun at the deathbed of the great East German writer Karl Mickel, Hiroshima, fifty-seven years after the fact, the flooding of Dresden in 2002: catastrophe and disaster crop up repeatedly.
Decline and fall are prominent, but the central loss is still that of the German Democratic Republic, the failed socialist experiment which was replaced by a system that has clearly not yet -- so Braun -- proven itself.
Braun is no angry young man: angry, yes, but so much more convincing and effective for not shouting at the reader, but rather writing completely controlled (with the very occasional sharp outburst when he can't hold it in any longer).
It takes a poet who has been through a lot to conclude a poem: -- about Marcus Aurelius --:

Rom geht unter und die Ruhe bleibt.

(Rome goes under and the calm remains.)

This is a book filled with variations on failure -- of a century, of countries and ideologies, of physical failure.
Even a cancelled reading is the subject of a riff.
The title of the collection refers to a Philip Sidney poem (Splendidis longum valedico Nugis), and the beginning of that poem reflect Braun's resignation and remaining ambition: "Leave me, o Love, which reaches but to dust, / And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things !"
A critical idealist, Braun has always been aspiring; in older age a touch of resignation seems to have crept in.
What anger there is -- and his wicked humour -- prevent the collection from being particularly downbeat: there's still that twinkle in his eye (cataracts and all) that comes across.
Auf die schönen Possen is a fairly typical Braun-collection, perhaps more varied (almost haphazard) than most, but certainly worth a look.